Scott Johnson / The FuzzyGroup, Feedster / PHP Consulting / Random geeky stuff / I Blog Therefore I Am.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Tough Choices: SuperNova or OSCON ???
As I may have blogged (its hard to remember what I've blogged lately), I recently made the choice to attend Kevin Werbach'sSuperNova conference over O'Reilly's OSCON. Now that was a tough decision and I thought elaborating on it might be interesting to some folks. There's a partial date overlap (OSCON is longer but SuperNova is in the middle) and there's just no way I can get to both.
Well I'm not ashamed to say that I think OSCON is a romping amount of fun. It may be geeky but its fun. When I was there last year, I got to meet great people like Ben, Mena, Jeremy Zawodny, Michael Bernstein and others, enjoyed the beautiful location (San Diego), heard top notch speakers, geeked out to the Max and more. Not to mention the fact that I just plain learned quite a bit. I mean I'd like to think I'm a (small) part of the Open Source community and this conference really makes you feel like you are. That's cool.
And then there's SuperNova. This sounds like a just plain awesome conference. Great speakers like Joi Ito, Kevin Lynch, Reed Hundt !!!, Mena Trott, Jonathan Schwartz, Clay Shirky and others. A kicking agenda. Kevin himself. And more. I know all too well that these are the type of people I should be talking to about Feedster (well maybe not Reed Hundt). And I've been reading Kevin's stuff for years and years. That makes it tough.
So my choice is Fun or Contacts? Community I belong to versus Community I should belong to? The way I finally decided is simple -- most of the people at OSCON I can reach digitally. The people at SuperNova are harder to reach that way (Joi Ito being a notable exception). So from a "Grow Feedster Into Something Real" perspective, I should be at SuperNova.
So if you're at SuperNova, feel free to catch me in the halls. I'll miss OSCON but I have to attend SuperNova.
At the potential risk of doing something very, very stupid before I leave the office for a few days, I fixed searching for urls in Feedster which was kind of, but not completely, broken. Example: The 4,184+ urls that reference Feedster.
Note: I know that this could be and should be a lot better. Right now I'm not at all saying its perfect as much as saying "improvements have been made".
Woo Hoo: Thank You Tim, Thank You Chris and Most of All Thank You Dave or DQSD Has Feedster Now!
Wow. This is just plain awesome. Dave's Quick Search Desk Bar has built-in Feedster support. All you do is type in rss:TERM_TO_SEARCH_FOR and it just plain works. Nifty.
My revised configuration file which (should) make searches date sorted (I haven't tested it since I can't find where to put it; I know it goes in the searches directory but where's that off of ?)
Online Fraud or If You Have a Business Credit Card, Please Listen
This is something I haven't blogged about yet even though it happened back in February. I've been holding back but the level of restraint that is holding back the flood of wrath, bile and invective that I wish to unleash upon Citizen's Bank of Massschusetts is breaking. Its definitely breaking. And while I don't have time to blog the whole sad story, I do have an important tip for business owners.
We all know that credit card fraud limits you to either nothing or approximately $50, right? I mean this is true and its good, right?
Actually that would be No. At least according to Citizen's Bank the rules are different for cards issued to employees of businesses. I've been trying to get a fraudulent transaction for over $1,000.00 reversed since February. And now I was just told that it will be another 30 days.
So when your bank wants to give you or your employees that ATM card with the Visa / Mastercard logo, just say NO! Because if the number is stolen and people use it for a purchase, you could find some or all of your bank account missing. That's what happened to my partner and I.
Note: If you're in Massachusetts, I strongly don't recommend Citizens Bank for the small business owner which I once did. So far I've been delayed, jerked around, had letters promised to me that never materialized, lied to and more.
Adopting Standards or "How to Get Scott to Do Something on Feedster for You"
Heh. I have to hand it to Kevin Burton of NewsMonster -- boy does he know how to get me to do things(1). Last night I got an IM from him asking for improvements in the RSS output and ****schwing**** I got on it right away. Here's why:
Cold, rainy night w/o a lot else to do.
Really good im conversation.
Everything he wanted done made sense. I'll admit that while I may not have 100% understood the need for it, he was patient and explained it.
He Gave Me Examples.
That last point, #4, is really, really important. Now the main thrust of what Kevin wanted was RDF 1.0 / RSS 1.0 format output for Feedster searches.
NOTE: Since I'm a Radio user, I automatically implemented RSS 2.0 support in Feedster and never thought twice about it. And I've not been following the different standards wars in this area. I just try and do what users want.
He also wanted more control of the RSS format which Kalsey has been asking for for some time. These are both rational, reasonable requests so I set forth on the "Add more R* output format quest". Roughly my first question was "example please" -- I've always been an example guy as opposed to a "grok the whole damn spec" guy. Its not that I don't know how to read the specs as much as a huge respect for market driven things. Specs are fine but what really matters to me is how the real world does things. So he gave me an example and I set about revising that portion of Feedster in full. In particular I'm templatizing (sp?) the output using Smarty so the next R* output format
So hats off to you Kevin. Good job. Its all in progress and I'll be in touch.
Postscript: Why Didn't I Push Him to Just Use RSS 2.0?
Right as I was typing the last of this, it occurred to me that I could have just asked him to use the RSS 2.0 support, right? Well I know he's writing an aggregator in C / C++ / Java (I'm pretty sure its Java). It's a heck of a lot easier for me to generate what he needs than for him to rewrite his parser. I mean tons easier -- I could be wrong about that but I'd expect its hours for me versus multiple days for him. So far better for me to add it.
Footnotes
(1)I really don't think that this was intentional at all but it sure worked.
Chicken Nuggets, Children's Health, Search and Retrieval and Getting What You Pay For
Note: This ended up being less of a rant than I expected but it is interesting (I think) in that all search engines differ and you do need to read the directions at times.
I happened to mention in an offhand manner to a friend with small children recently that chicken nuggets were bad for children. The reaction was close to instantaneous -- "WHAT !!!". "Sure -- didn't you see the article in the Wall Street Journal?" was my response. "No". So I volunteered to dig it up and send it over (for all the issues, god bless email very, very much). They received this article which I have reproduced here.
Now I have no problem with the WSJ's policy of selling their content. They're a publisher and they can do whatever they want. What I do have issue with -- and its a very large issue -- is offering a service that is, imho, broken.
The 1st thing I did was dig up my wsj username and password. Not pleasant but something that I accomplished. The next step was to do a search and what I looked for was
chicken nugget children
Results? 0 articles. Then I read the text on the page which indicated that it was searching only the past 30 days. Hm... That's odd and I don't remember that.
That's the search UI reproduced -- sure as heck looks like it can't do more than 30 days, doesn't it? Trying to figure out exactly what privileges my subscription entails totally didn't work. Look at the registration form where they immediately try to sell me rather than tell me what I'm buying. I mean come on -- talk to me, flirt with me, romance me, chat me up. Don't try and get down to business right away! Anyway ... I think tried their paid search option which is $2.95 per article using the same query. Here is the url. Interestingly that also had no results. Now that's really odd since the come on is this:
Search the Wall Street Journal and thousands of news publications dating back up to 15+ years. Headlines are free, articles $2.95. The Wall Street Journal
I find it hard to believe that in 15 years the Wall Street Journal has NOT published a single article with the three words Chicken Nugget Children in it.
So I went back to the main search ui and shortened my search to
Chicken Nugget
And that actually found the article I was looking for. Then I checked the article for the words Chicken Nugget Children. Yup. All words were there and even in that exact form (i.e. not chicken nuggets). Now I'm a search junkie so its understandable that I can find it but I do wonder about people without search skills -- are they getting what they paid for?
Note: I know they say "Enter words separated by: AND, OR, NOT." and if I do add the AND between all three terms, it does find it but then why does it work when I specify only Chicken Nugget? Automatically adding the required AND term is trivial. I mean even Feedster does it.
A friend rightfully chastised me for never linking to Smarty given my recent talk about it. Oops.
(And in case you're wondering, today's (forthcoming) flood of blogging is definitely related to my not being able to blog for the next few days so I'm trying to stop the "jonesing for 'da blog fix" by doing it in advance.)
Help! I Just Graduated with a Computer Science Degree And Please, Please Don't Make Me Work at the Mall
Note: I wrote this last year at about this time and now that I re-read it, the economy is about the same and this is probably useful. To readers who read it earlier, I apologize for the repeat.
This article was inspired by Carole, who emailed me out of the blue, and pointed out to me just how hard it is to launch a career when you just graduated -- and the economy basically stinks (at least for high technology). Thanks Carole. I hope this helps. So, here it goes, 10 recommendations for the new graduate.
